WHEN UNCLE CHUCKIE HAD TO MAKE A DECISION

 

Every once in a while, fortunately not very often, the ground just sort of opens up beneath you.  Last September it happened to me, along with lots of other writers, artists, etc..  But in my case it caused me a bit of serious thinking.

 

You see I was having a merry old time last year.  With my Psionic Terrorism book up on a secure website that no one could touch, I was free to unleash my most bizarre humor upon the world.  It was great fun, calling myself an International Terrorist and watching the looks on people’s faces.

 

Then KABOOM!!!

 

The first three days after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was too damned mad to think about books.  All that was on my mind was bloody revenge and I’m sort of glad that I’m a middle-aged man living in Nowhere, Wisconsin because otherwise I might have gone out with a gun and done something I would seriously regret later.  But years have a way of tempering temper and so I set about to use psionics to do as much damage as possible and, like I said, it took about three days for me to come down and start to think in terms of “How the hell am I ever going to top that one?”

 

Ok, I’ve got a sort of perverse way of looking at things, but hell, perversion is my middle name.

 

Then it dawned on me when it became obvious that the counter on the T book was being blown off the charts (to this day we have no idea how many hits or downloads that thing got) that maybe I should sort of reconsider even having the book available.  After all, I don’t want to be mistaken for some nut with a dishtowel on his head trying to read a flight manual backwards.

 

And I thought about that for a day and came to a conclusion.

 

The book stays!

 

I believe in freedom, above all else.  That is, after all, the reason I wrote it in the first place.  Would I allow myself to be deprived of the basic right to write and publish what I see fit because of the actions of group of madmen and the ravings of paranoids?  Well, for anyone who knows me, the answer was obvious.   The book would remain in place for anyone to read.  To do otherwise, to remove the book, would have been to surrender to the enemy without and the cowards and would be tyrants within.

 

So I made my decision.  After all, freedom is not only the right to make people comfortable.  It is the right to make them uncomfortable.  It is the right to present things that some folks would rather not see presented.  It is the right to defy control and cowardice, to say what you believe and call things as you see them.

 

It is the right to present ideas and information unfettered by fools.

 

So the book stays.